Mountain Embrace

Every time these mountains catch my eye, I admire their shameless grandiosity.

Reaching serenely up into sky and down into valley, arms wide open.

Resolutely holding sacred space by being none other than themselves.

Longing took me closer and after two years I found myself a thousand metres up nestled in the mountain’s embrace.  Closer to their heart.  I felt myself falling in love and letting myself be loved by this gentle and jaw-dropping mass. I loved to play flute and drum in these mountains.  To chant and sing.  To move.  To cry.  Sometimes to speak out loud what was in my heart, sometimes to scream and shout.  Often to lay down a blanket and meditate or sleep. 

During a 6-week retreat in the tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, I would take my cushion and blanket to a rocky outcrop and melt there into the sky.  Sometimes eagles would circle overhead as ancient Tibetan chants sprinkled through my body.  I would wake in the night with mantras on my tongue and the mountain in my heart.

What draws our gaze to a mountain range?

What draws our feet there?

What lights up our heart?

To imagine being a mountain, grounded and souring at the same time.

How does it feel in the body?

How often do we use this analogy of being steady and grounded like a mountain?  In yoga and meditation. Can you feel that way your body knows mountain?  The memory of mountain.  Solid and also permeable, steady without being stuck, ancient and with precise foresight, imperfect yet unreactive, graceful and powerful all at once.

I don’t think this experience of mountain-ness can come with a lot of thinking about mountains.  It is more about spending time in actual peaks, or in meditation, getting the felt sense of mountain, perhaps through the memory of our bones once being mountains, or listening to a story we love about mountains.  Then we can perhaps notice those moments in our lives when mountain posture might help.  When we need some of that mountain essence in our life.  And we invite the memory in.  Let each cell of our body align to mountain.  Is this love?

"So to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being.  (Wo)man has no other reason for (her/) his existence" Nan Shepherd from The Living Mountain

Once I felt called to Arunachala, a holy mountain of south India. 

There I met my teacher.  

Later I went to the sacred peaks of Snowdonia. 

There I met a part of myself I had forgotten. 

Then I was drawn into the mysterious Pyrenees.

 Where I learned something about love.

For three cycles of nine moons the Pyrenees have been my home.  I lived in a Buddhist community.  Gradually I migrated to the edge of the community and into the forest alone, still held in the love there, I let the practices I had learned continue to weave into my life in their own way.  As this happened I began to feel an increasing momentum towards a new unfolding.  A sense that this chapter is over whether I like it or not.  So after living a few years now in relative isolation I feel a new call into participation.  I am not sure how this will take shape.

So when I said goodbye to precious friends in my mountain home, I found myself saying thank you for the incredible support and welcome of Lama Tenzin, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche and the lineage of teachers and practitioners who have helped bring this place to fruition, and of course, to the mountain, where I remembered my own song.